Roy,
> I checked with tech support that makes the 3ware controllers. The
> 9000 series is for SATA drives only. They don't have anything for
> PATA drives that support access to the SMART data, according to the
> guy who took the call.
That is correct.
> On the other hand, I didn't get a very confident feeling talking to
> this tech support guy. He claimed the problem in accessing the SMART
> data was that it was stored in hexadecimal format, and the problem
> was in converting it to user-friendly format. Unbelievable. Where
> do they get these people?
The tech support means the SMART support provided by 3ware web-interface
or CLI. It is actually a hex dump of the SMART data sector which is
useless without a tool to interpret. But smartmontools 5.37 allows to
interpret this dump via pseudo-devicenames /dev/tw-cli/....
The tech support might be unaware of the native SMART support in their
recent 9000 windows drivers. I did not find any note about this in the
driver release notes, documentation or knowledgebase.
Even the smartmontools related KB Entry
(http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=10080) entry wasn't updated.
I posted a comment, but this did never appear.
BTW: It is also not cleanly documented that the 3ware firmware locks
the drives to the controller with an ATA password(!). Probably their
support got some trouble with this (IMO) non-feature, as it has been
reportedly removed from latest 95XX firmware ;-).
Christian

Thread view

Roy,
> I checked with tech support that makes the 3ware controllers. The
> 9000 series is for SATA drives only. They don't have anything for
> PATA drives that support access to the SMART data, according to the
> guy who took the call.
That is correct.
> On the other hand, I didn't get a very confident feeling talking to
> this tech support guy. He claimed the problem in accessing the SMART
> data was that it was stored in hexadecimal format, and the problem
> was in converting it to user-friendly format. Unbelievable. Where
> do they get these people?
The tech support means the SMART support provided by 3ware web-interface
or CLI. It is actually a hex dump of the SMART data sector which is
useless without a tool to interpret. But smartmontools 5.37 allows to
interpret this dump via pseudo-devicenames /dev/tw-cli/....
The tech support might be unaware of the native SMART support in their
recent 9000 windows drivers. I did not find any note about this in the
driver release notes, documentation or knowledgebase.
Even the smartmontools related KB Entry
(http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=10080) entry wasn't updated.
I posted a comment, but this did never appear.
BTW: It is also not cleanly documented that the 3ware firmware locks
the drives to the controller with an ATA password(!). Probably their
support got some trouble with this (IMO) non-feature, as it has been
reportedly removed from latest 95XX firmware ;-).
Christian